Henry Cyril Casserley was born on 12 June 1903 in Clapham, South London,
son of Edward Casserley, a minor Post Office official.He died on 16 December
1991. Henry spent his working life in the head offices of the Prudential
Assurance Company in London (evacuated to Derby in WW2). He married Kathleen
Goose on 16 July 1931. Full details of their family are not published, but
they had at least one son, Richard, born 1936 or 1937, who also took up
photography and has latterly acted as custodian of his father's collection.
an exceptionally persistent photographer, especially during the period between
1920 and 1951, and he covered an extraordinary mileage initially by train
(there are charming photographs of his honeymoon taken in some unlikely locations
in the Scottish Highlands, including one in a Pullman observation car, and
later by car which features in many of the photographs. There are few historical
features on either locomotives or obscure branch lines which do not include
a few of his photographs.
The family lived beside the railway line just east of Bromley South railway
station from 1931 to 1939 but moved to a house on a new estate at Berkhamsted,
Hertfordshire, because the electrification of the Southern Railway greatly
reduced the number of steam trains passing Bromley. Casserley acquired his
first motor car in 1934, which aided his reaching obscure small railway lines
and investigating windmills, in which he had also developed an interest.
He was in military service from 19421944, mostly based in the Army
stores section at Bicester, but was invalided out and returned to his job
at the Prudential. He retired in 1964 and devoted himself to his 'second
career' as photographer and writer. His wife died in about 1986 and his interest
and memory then declined until his death, aged 88.
H. C. Casserley's first camera was a Kodak no.2 folding Brownie with f/8
Rapid rectilinear lens acquired in 1919, but this was soon replaced by a
professional standard Butcher's 'Popular Pressman' quarter-plate reflex camera
(using 4¼" x 3¼" glass plates). In 1937 he replaced it with one
of the new Leica 35 mm cameras, which was much more convenient and served
him until the end of his career, being replaced with an identical model when
the original was stolen in 1963. Despite a few experiments with early commercial
colour film, he remained committed to the black-and-white medium to the end
and always did his own processing and printing. He was meticulous in keeping
records of his negatives, using a numbering system he later shared with his
son, and estimated that he had personally taken 60,000 railway subjects by
1972, in some fifty-two years of work. He started by recording locomotives,
usually 'on shed' because of the bulk of his camera and the slow film speeds,
but he expanded his range to cover scenes in and around stations as his desire
to travel over all lines of railway in the British Isles took him to obscure
corners of the railway system. There are many characteristic broadside shots
of Southern Railway locos 'at the bottom of the garden' in Bromley in the
1930s, but generally he had little time for the scenic movement in railway
photography, being strictly a 'photographer of record'. He largely stopped
photographing railways with the end of steam traction on British Railways
and Córas Iompair Éireann.
Important record photographer both of locomotives and of branch lines. Much
of his travel was by car (which features in many of his photographs). His
1937 Hillman Minx is shown on a transit through the Severn Tunnel on a flat
truck at Pilning station see
Backtrack, 2016, 30, 484).
His wife also features in many of the earlier pictures, including many taken
on their honeymoon, including ones taken in the Pullman observation car Maid
of Morvern on the Oban line. . See: Baker,
Michael H.C. Taking the strain: .
Much of his output was recorded both in articles and in books Tribute
from R.C. Riley (Br. Rly. J., 1992, (40), 11.)..

The historic locomotive pocketbook: from the "Rocket" to the end of
steam. London, Batsford, 1960.256 p. 202 illus. A chronological selection.

LNER steam, 1923-1948. Truro: Bradford Barton.Some of the individual pages are noteworthy. Thus page 13 features
the fully streamlined W1 No. 10000 passing Potters Bar golf course, and below
it streamlined B17 No. 2870 City of London climbing Brentwood bank
overhauling a B12 (No. 8540) on a slow train on 15 July 1939. Another page
features the U1 2-8-8-2 Garratt at Wentworth Junction on 18 April 1947 above
Sentinel railcar No. 265 Neptune on Durham Viaduct in May 1935. The
location for the picture of No. 10000 was selected again for a picture of
the Royal Train en route to Sandringham hauled by Royal Claud Hamilton No.
8783. Some of the best photographs occupy two pages: this includes that of
a GNR 4-4-0 No. 4348 at Kirkby Stephen en route towards Stainmore.